Things that spring from my head on education and technology

You bought Glass, so now what? You’ve got $1500 of wearable headset time to get out there.

Get Setup

First get your phone setup and connected to Glass. Make sure you have tethering turned on so you can use Glass everywhere. If you have an Iphone make sure the MyGlass app is working. This will give you data and navigation everywhere.

Next practice using the screencast feature on The MyGlass app. This lets you show people how it works without having to take it off, get it setup on their heads. This comes in handy for times when you get asked for details.

Third go and get a few apps setup. I recommend Weather Alerts, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and Google hangouts. Winkfeed which does RSS feeds is also pretty cool, but can be a overwhelming. SocialRadar is coming soon and you’ll want that too.

Your first adventure

Now put on Glass and go out and do something. I suggest a trip to the park, museum, a hike a bike ride or just a long walk.

Glass really shines as a kind of video journaling tool. Practice making short ten second videos that you will later be able to pull together to help recall and share the experience from your POV. You can share these moments as the happen on Facebook, Gplus or twitter or wait until it is over.

Get past that awkward dating stage

You might feel a bit awkward. Rather than taking off your Glass remind yourself you are a cyborg, living in the future. As I’ve walked around I’ve noticed that most people don’t even notice you have it on.

The feeling of awkwardness will pass quickly (after a few times out).

Dealing with questions and gawkers

Once or twice a week you will get asked by random strangers overcome by curiosity, “What is that thing on your face, or is that Google Glass.” It is easy to get tripped up into thinking that someone wants a long explanation and a long social interaction is required of even expected. In my experience most people are satisfied with short and concise answers:

Q: Hey dude is that Google Glass
A: Yes
Q: what do you think of it?
A: It’s great.

Keep in mind that this stranger’s inquiry is like the “how are you doing?” part of a business conversation. They stranger doesn’t really want to hear about your problems. If the stranger wants more details they will ask. In my experience strangers are generally excited to see the new gadget, and acknowledgement that they saw it is all they are looking for. You will mostly make them uncomfortable by detaining them with your detailed product review. Be polite but minimalist in your interaction.

I’m still waiting for my own pair of Google Glass. I managed to borrow a pair for a few minutes and here are my first impressions.

The Screen — The screen was smaller than I expected. Hold your right arm out with two fingers together pointing left. The screen is about two fingers high and from the tip of an index finger to the middle knuckle wide. I plan to prototype UI wireframe a with small sticky notes.

Overall Experience — it was less intrusive and awkward than I expected. It was a little hard to get the screen in the right place, but once I did it was very clear. The bone conducting speaker made the audio from Glass very clear even in a crowded room. I could see myself using this without feeling like a guy with a bluetooth headset.

Apps – I got to play with the Navigation, NY Times and picture taking apps. The navigation app was pretty cool and I think this will be killer. Photos and video are difficult to see what you are getting because the resolution on the display (640×320) isn’t high enough to show detail. You won’t be using Glass as an eReader yet.

User interface — the user interface is driven by voice commands and flipping forward and back touching the side of the device. The apps are based on a card / menu driven system, sort of like a hypertext PowerPoint. Voice recognition was fairly good, but the menu driven nature of things and limited display space will challenge designers.

Battery life — the Glass users I talked to suggested that battery life is a weakness of the current product generation. Continuous usage seems to be 1-3 hours before the device needs recharging. However the device isn’t on all the time, so this should be find for more casual users.

It is rumored that Glass will not be widely available to consumers until next year. I anticipate that Google will refine the device before shipping. I hope that they are able improve the screen and battery life before GA.

Bottom line: I will buy this as soon as I can. Even as a first generation technology it is very compelling.

In August of 1999 I joined a small startup that was intent on changing education using the power of the Internet. My colleagues and I did it. It has been incredibly fun, challenging, full of highs and lows and ultimately satisfying. I got to write and design products used by millions of people. I traveled the world, met thousands of people, saw some amazing things and heard incredible stories. I want to sincerely thank every one of you who made that possible.

What’s Next

Some of you might be wondering what’s next for me. I have no comment at this time. If my life is a reality TV series I’m going to end this season on a cliff hanger.

Last week I told you that the job you wanted didn’t exist, that your ideas are terrible and you will fail. Now that we’ve dismissed your fantasies about how amazing life will be when the world recognizes the genius of your innovative technology product and the press / customers universally grant you laurels while handing over mountains of cash; let’s get you started.

One of the most important things you are going to need is money and advice from people who have done this before. Even if you are doing a “lean startup“, you will find that eventually getting someone else to cover some of the startup costs is useful. Be careful though, the people with the money will be happy to get you to build your business into a thriving enterprise and leave you with only crumbs at the end. I’ve made you a list broken out into three categories of organizations to pitch your idea to. I don’t endorse any of these groups and I caution you to do your own research before doing business with them.

Accelerators / Incubators

Accelerators / Incubators provide training and sometimes money to help you take the earliest steps in building your business. Usually they can offer some mix of office space, small grants (a few thousand dollars), training and access to advisors. The following are ones that I’ve seen in the news recently that seem especially focused on EdTech. There are thousands of others out there.

Kapplan EdTech Accelerator — The Kaplan EdTech Accelerator is a three month intensive, deep immersion program for ten education startups

Pearson Catalyst — The Pearson Catalyst incubator program aims to match startups with Pearson brands to deliver pilot programmes and offer access to Pearson resources and product experts, including the opportunity to work closely with a Pearson brand over the course of the program.

Imagine K-12 — Imagine K12 is a 3.5 month program for founders and hackers intent on changing the world.

4.0 Schools — 4.0 is a design lab for curious people committed to unprecedented innovation in education.

Y Combinator — Not specifically edtech focused, but one of the more talked about startups.

Angel Investors, MicroFunds and Venture Funds

These are the more traditional sources of funding. These are usually comprised of “accredited investors” These are usually rich people or groups of rich people with money and resources to investigate your company and business plan before they invest. These groups tend to overlap and the terms usually apply to the scale of investment made. Angel Investors are usually individuals who provide seed investments (usually less than $1 million) to startups. MicroFunds are just groups of Angel investors who get together to spread these small investments around to a number of companies. Venture Funds are larger pools of money that focus on making multi-million dollar investments.

Crunchbase — a general registry of tech companies, but also useful for finding out which funds are backing particular ventures.

VentureBeat — provides news and information about startups and funding.

Crowd Funding

The Internet has enabled a new kind of funding model. Crowd funding lets you take your concept to social media and then market it to potential customers and others who like your technology idea. The people you engage give small amounts of money towards your seed funding goal. Typically potential customers will get a discount or moved to the front of the line when the product becomes available.

Your Friends and Family

You should be careful here. Make sure they understand that your intent is to lose their money in an epic failure. They are paying for a very expensive wedding that will end in a divorce. Still the journey will be character building for you and there is a remote chance, like a lottery ticket that they will make some money out of it. I am not going to list your friends and family here, because you have Facebook for that.

Personal Learning Environments (PLE)’s like ePortfolios seem like a great idea that has yet to coalesce into a winning product. How about a bit of community brainstorming and requirements ideation. Since these are Personal Learning Environments we want, let’s write short “ads” in the style of Craigslist/Newspaper personals. For example:

This last week I had a chance to sit down with some seniors at GWU and talk about my experience in the exciting world of software startups. It was a fun experience and gave me a chance to reflect on my 18 years working on web and Internet based software projects. Here are a few of the observations I shared with the class:

The Job You Want Doesn’t Exist. You Have to Create it.

Every year Forbes Magazine publishes a list of jobs that didn’t exist a decade ago. If you are really planning to change the world with your ideas and technology be prepared for the fact that your job doesn’t exist. You will need to invent it. In fact you are going to have to invent a bunch of other jobs to make the business and its ecosystem emerge.

In 1995 when I graduated from college the Internet was just beginning to be a thing. I ended up getting a job as a webmaster. This was 1995. The web hadn’t even existed when I started my studies in 1991. As I started my career, this technology wave was rising. A series of lucky events placed me in the right place to catch this wave. I graduated and got a job as a “webmaster”. I’ve learned to look for these waves and that if you make yourself ready you can catch it.

The job you want on that coming wave doesn’t exist yet. When you first start doing it, people will say, “WTF?” When I told my roommate about my job as a “webmaster” he joked, “webmaster? what are you spiderman?”

You are Going Continuously Fail and Suck

I don’t mean in the baseball way where you get so many at bats but you’re a champion if you get on base 30% of the time. I don’t mean it like the classic Edison quote, “I haven’t failed, I’ve just figured out 10,000 ways it doesn’t work.” I want you to have the expectation that it isn’t going to work period. You are going to pretty much spend every day alternating between totally failing and just merely sucking at what you are trying to do. Your life will be a series of broken builds, bugs, things that were really great in theory but users hated. Eventually out of all these failures something beautiful might emerge. That failure might even become a runaway success. Even so, in ten years you are going to look back and say, “wow that was terrible.”

This point was better said in this Helpful PSA Entitled: Point/Counter-Point Should I Get a Tattoo.

Encourage Plain Speaking and Criticism

It is really hard to hear how terrible your idea is or tell a team member their idea is terrible. Even though almost every idea is terrible in one way or another. It is very easy to stand around smiling and nodding, but that really doesn’t help. When you do that terrible ideas live on. They are never forced to evolve. Worse, critics start talking behind the backs of the leader of the initiative. A terrible idea ends up moving forward but is undermined by the organization. The result of this is usually something worse than the terrible idea itself. You don’t have to be mean about it. You have to set the expectation with your team that most ideas are probably going to be pretty terrible. If an idea isn’t terrible when it is first pitched then you probably didn’t spot how terrible the idea was.
It requires a bit of a thick skin to stand up there and hear about how terrible your ideas are. Hopefully some of the critics will have helpful suggestions such as “never speak of this again” or “that might be cool if…” Don’t let those criticism over whelm you. Keep trying. Come up with other ideas, or revisit the idea a bit differently. Keep pushing and prototyping until something useful emerges from that brain of yours.

Don’t be a Jerk Every Day

Some say I still need to learn this lesson. When you speak plainly and recognize how terrible the thing you are working on is, it becomes very easy to become a gruff and nasty person to your fellow human beings. This is something to be avoided. Keep your criticisms to the writers room. Find time to reach out and bring snacks for the team. Recognize the few moments of success where even though it will likely blow up again soon; things are actually going well. Every person is going to have a different level of tolerance and general stubbornness. It is your job as a fellow human being to recognize how hard you have to push and push no harder.

Lead by Establishing a Common Purpose, Drive People Towards Mastery and Reward Autonomy

I believe that big breakthroughs usually come from small, super motivated, agile teams. Dan Pink has a great Ted Talk on the core concepts of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. It is very easy to break your team’s spirit. As a manager and the visionary one can easily fall into the trap of “I have this huge vision and a list of a thousand things for you to do, now go do it people.” The first thing you have to realize is that your vision is wrong. There are a few useful things in there, but seriously your idea will fail. Even if the developers manage to meet the impossible schedule, divine all of your hidden features and get everything exactly as you wanted it the first time.

If you really want to make amazing things with your small team. You have to push your team to deeply understand the customers and the overall purpose of what you want to accomplish. Then you need to encourage and reward initiative that drives towards that result. Keep your team focused on the purpose, on the broader cause. Don’t let them get too bogged down in requirements and mockups.

The Advice About “When to Ship” Is Probably Wrong

You will often hear that you need to ship early and often to customers. There is a lot of value in getting feedback from customers. Still this can be bad advice. It really depends on how your users perceive you and how you are going to manage the impact of the changes you’re making. If you throw a bunch of change at the users on a continuous basis they will go find something more stable. Change takes time for the users to absorb. You have to understand the amount of change your users can accommodate and then go no faster.

Don’t Cram Your Releases

It is always tempting to try to fill up the release with millions of new ideas and concepts. You probably have a list of things your users want and it always feels great to check them off the list. However in keeping with the last point, know that your users can only understand a few new things at a time. My favorite example of this is the launch of the iPad. All the other tablet makers lined up at CES before Apple announced it’s tablet and tried to create their own. Sprint had one that had a bendable screen. Microsoft and HP had one that opened into two screens like a book. Everyone was wondering what the iPad was going to be and there was universal derision in the tech press when it turned out to basically be a really bigger version of the iTouch. It turned out though that this was really a smart move. They made on major change (size) and left out things like a camera until users had made the leap. It would have been easy for apple to cram a bunch of other things into the iPad 1, but they didn’t. A release is a little like telling a story. If your story is too long, no one reads it. If you build a bunch of functionality that users never know about; then all that effort was wasted.

Continuously Invest in Things that Hook Your Users and/or Your Users Have to Do

You need to measure every page your the app or website. What things are your users doing often, whats their experience and how can you improve it. The team I managed working on CourseSites was always looking at the signup page. How long did a signup take. Could you easily find your institution. We wanted to grow usage of the site, so that meant we had to continuously invest in that page. Every release it gets tweaked and improved. We set goals to improve the accuracy of the data capture, and reduce dropouts.

If you don’t know how you users are using the product and you don’t know what hooked them; then it is impossible to manage the product over the long term. It is very easy to get caught up in making some flashy new capability based on some latest market buzz, but if that leads to neglect of a critical feature then you are going to suffer in the marketplace. You also need to understand that usage will shift over time. Things that were compelling a few years ago, will be dead on your site tomorrow.

Maintenance Will Be Most of Your Job

Of the course of a successful software product’s lifespan something like 90% of the effort goes into maintenance, not new functionality. Before the product goes into widespread usage you will get an opportunity to explore and innovate tons of new capabilities. Once it gets adoption, your users are going to demand continuous improvement. They may even resent totally new features because they will see it as taking away from expanding the things they like to do. Maintenance gets kind of a bad rap. People mistake maintenance for a lack of innovation. Well managed maintenance is continuously optimizing things. It is speeding up transactions, improving reliability and polish, and simplifying workflows. Consider Google search. We don’t need a totally new user interface for Google. We just need it to constantly stay on top of the changing set of information on the internet and give us the best results. Microsoft tried some really innovative things in launching Bing!. Automatic product recommendations, health advice, travel stuff. They even marketed it as a “decision engine”, not just search. However ultimately it has struggled, because those features were not the core feature and are not compelling enough to draw a user away from Google. Google has worked to maintain a slight edge on search results through regular maintenance.

Closing Point

If you take anything away from this essay try to remember this. There are terrible things that are useful and things that are just terrible. If you are able to make something useful into something slightly less terrible then the world is yours.

Augmented Reality is an emerging technology that will have a profound impact on how we engage with the physical and virtual world. I’ve written this blog to give educators some more background on this trend. Here is a quick visual example of the capabilities that emerge from this technology. In this short video you will see virtual dominoes placed on a real object using a touch screen. Next the user “touches” the physical space and the virtual dominoes fall down.

Defining Augmented Reality

I define Augmented Reality or “AR” as a set of technologies that integrate the physical world with digital information to create a enhanced and unified experience via a seamless user interface. Consider apps that combine the smartphone viewfinder, GPS and camera to augment perception of the physical world. An example of this is Blackboard’s Explorer for iPhone app or Wikitude.

There is more to this than just hacking the smartphone viewfinder. To better explain this technology I’ve grouped it into three dimensions: X, Y and Z coordinates.

The X Axis: From 5 Senses to 5000

Consider the impact real time computer sensory data on top of our own biological senses. We can provide the user with enhanced perception, continuous biological monitoring, improved motion and location services. As mentioned above AR Apps like Wikitude and Blackboard Explorer leverage a smartphone, viewfinder and GPS to enhance the visual experience. The form factor of looking through the smart phone viewfinder is still a bit awkward. This fall (2013) expect to see devices like Google’s Project Glass provide an integrated “heads up display” for early adopters. The number of sensors being integrated into our phones and apps is enormous. My Nike’s talk to my phone while I run. I’ve got a Neurosky headset that can give me a real time EEG readout while I mediate. Apps are helping us sleep better by monitoring how restless we are in the bed. Near Field Communications chips and QR Codes are creating cheap infrastructure for hyperlinks between the real world as virtual.

The Y Axis: Motion Capture Based Interfaces

Gestures are already taking over from the mouse and keyboard on tablets and smartphones. Gestures captured via cameras on our computing devices using gadgets like XBOX Kinect and the Leap Motion Controller are the next wave. There are already really cool classroom activities and lessons built around Kinect. Leap Motion announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January that a number of manufactures will have their device built into high end laptops and gaming PC’s later this year. This technology is important because it simplifies the user experience and makes it easy for developers to merge physical and virtual space. As seen in the domino example above this synthesis creates interesting possibilities for simulation and interaction.

The Z Axis: 3D Projection Maps

Capturing motion and augmenting perception are increasingly combined with digital projectors to create 3D projection maps. Already this tech is appearing at concerts and stage performances. These technologies enable a digital projector to generate geometric shapes that are placed on real objects on a stage. Multiple projectors can be linked to create some awesome displays.

Look at this performance by Dandypunk called, “The Alchemy of Light” for a really stunning example of an interactive performance using 3D projection maps.

Educators should be excited about the new kinds of immersive learning simulations that will appear as this technology goes mainstream. I encourage more DIY/maker minded educators to look for ways to get students building projects that leverage these devices and systems. Most of these technologies have robust online communities and open source tools to help get you started.

A recent conference call with Java’s head of security, Milton Smith, said the right things. As an organization it seems like Oracle finally realizes just what a problem they’ve got for themselves and that the road to cleaning up the mess is more than a single patch. Oracle is taking steps like automatically removing older versions of Java when you update to the latest, as reported in The Register. If one has a broken application, one of the most important steps is to get your customers down to fewer different versions. It is a painful process because there will often be short term customer attrition during that phase. Yet history has shown that this consolidation leads to better overall products and increased innovation.

While we tend to think of “remotely piloted aircraft” or “drones” as the domain of the military or perhaps R/C hobbyists; dramatically lowered costs, smart phone based controller and improved pilot control by software assistance are about to enable this technology to cross into mainstream usage. This technology opens up new possibilities for educators looking for new ways to excite and engage students.

This drone includes two cameras, flies for about 8 minutes and can be piloted via your smartphone or tablet with streaming video from the drone.

I recently purchased one and here is some footage at a river near my home.

Earlier this week San Francisco Based Always Innovating announced the MeCam mini-copter. This copter is designed to be controlled by voice commands and designed to get around the nagging problem of who holds the camera while you stand for the picture.

This is a big step forward for the technology. High density batteries enable 10-15 minute flight times, software and sensors have simplified flight controls and the unit is fully assembled instead of comming in a kit like traditional R/C aircraft. The manufacturer has included an SDK and a USB port which creates a nice platform for hacking and extending the device.

The rise of relatively lower cost, consumer and hacker friendly platforms has traditionally been a markers for a technology that is about to break out and go mainstream.

From an education technology perspective the quadcopter / multi-rotor platform has been used in a number of engineering programs. Consider this project from the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. The rise of a consumer friendly platform now enables a wider spectrum of students and educators to use this technology.

Here are some quick ideas for using this technology in studying natural sciences and humanities.

Natural Sciences — consider using the drones as part of field research and exercises. For example use the drone to conduct an aerial survey of a site to gain a fresh perspective. The students could use a map of the site and information about the drones flight characteristics such as altitude and total flight time to plan the route of the survey and then compare their data with information form sources such as Google earth to create an increased understanding of the site.

Digital Storytelling / Media — consider the ways that a hovering and flying camera platform could be used to get shots that otherwise would require a crane or real helicopter. There is also an opportunity to use the drone to view a crowd or augment coverage of an event.